Regarding a first aspect of the invention, typical ballast circuits for a gas discharge lamp include a pair of serially connected MOSFETs or other switches, which convert direct current to alternating current for supplying a resonant load circuit in which the gas discharge lamp is located. Various types of regenerative gate drive circuits have been proposed for controlling the pair of switches. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,349,270 to Roll et al. ("Roll") discloses gate drive circuitry employing an R-C (resistive-capacitive) circuit for adjusting the phase of gate-to-source voltage with respect to the phase of current in the resonant load circuit. A drawback of such gate drive circuitry is that the phase angle of the resonant load circuit moves towards 90.degree. instead of toward 0.degree. as the capacitor of the R-C circuit becomes clamped, typically by a pair of back-to-back connected Zener diodes. These diodes are used to limit the voltage applied to the gate of MOSFET switches to prevent damage to such switches. The resulting large phase shift prevents a sufficiently high output voltage that would assure reliable ignition of the lamp, at least without sacrificing ballast efficiency.
Additional drawbacks of the foregoing R-C circuits are soft turn-off of the MOSFETs, resulting in poor switching, and a slowly decaying ramp of voltage provided to the R-C circuit, causing poor regulation of lamp power and undesirable variations in line voltage and arc impedance.
Regarding a second aspect of the invention, it would be desirable to provide a ballast circuit of the foregoing type having a starting circuit for the regenerative gate drive circuitry configured to allow use of a dry-type capacitor for smoothing the output of an a.c.-to-d.c. rectifier.